Lee Jong-Wook

Lee Jong-Wook, who died yesterday aged 61, was almost three years into his five-year term as director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

His priorities on assuming office in July 2003 were the global fight against Aids, tuberculosis, malaria and polio, as well as discouraging smoking.

His stated aim to make antiretroviral medicines available to three million people with HIV/Aids by 2005 was not realised, but hundreds of thousands of lives were still saved; and he had recently endorsed a commitment to universal access to treatment by 2010.

Lee took over the WHO just as the outbreak of Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which originated in Asia and killed more than 800 people, was being contained.

But it was not long before the agency had to turn its attention to avian flu, amid fears that the virus could mutate into a strain easily transmitted between humans.

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In response to the threat posed by avian flu the WHO - which is based in Geneva, and has six regional offices around the world and an annual budget of some $1 billion - has been attempting to build up a reserve of antiviral medicines and encouraging vaccine research.

"We know another pandemic is inevitable," Lee said in 2004. "And when this happens, we also know that we are unlikely to have enough drugs, vaccines, health care workers and hospital capacity to cope in an ideal way. So we must act wisely."

At an international meeting held at Beijing in January, $1.9 billion was pledged to finance research and measures to deal with a possible pandemic.

Lee repeatedly stressed that every country should be prepared for a pandemic, and he lobbied many political leaders, including George W Bush, Jacques Chirac, and President Hu Jintao of China.

Lee Jong-Wook was born in Seoul, Korea, on April 12 1945, shortly before the country was divided along the 38th Parallel. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 Lee's father, a civil servant, was moved from Seoul to the city of Taegu.

Lee, with his mother and two brothers, had to walk 250 miles to join him, a journey that took two months. He later recalled: "My father thought we were beggars when he first saw us walking down the street. The first thing he did was take us to a bakery for cookies. I cried."

Having decided to become a doctor, Lee studied at the Seoul National University Medical School and the University of Hawaii's School of Public Health in Honolulu.

In 1981 he was offered a job at a hospital on Samoa, in the South Pacific, and two years later joined the WHO as a leprosy consultant in Fiji. By 1984 he had been put in charge of controlling the disease throughout the South Pacific region.

After a posting to Manila, in 1990 Lee was transferred to the WHO headquarters in Geneva, where he successfully oversaw efforts to eradicate polio in the Western Pacific - reported cases fell by 90 per cent under his watch.

In 1994 he was appointed director of the Global Programme for Vaccines and Immunisation (securing a three-fold increase in its funding) and executive secretary of an initiative to promote the vaccination of children.

In 1998 he became an adviser to the WHO's director general, the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. Two years later she put Lee in charge of the "Stop TB" initiative.

When Brundtland decided to step down in 2003, Lee was the only WHO insider contending for the job and the only candidate never to have held a ministerial post or to have been in charge of a UN agency. And when he was chosen as the WHO's sixth director general there were fears that he lacked the necessary political skills.

He himself said, however: "You can't make it to this position without being a politician, although it may be a different kind of politics. I am quite familiar with the issues and feel comfortable working with political people."

In his three years in office Lee travelled to more than 60 countries to visit health programmes and the people they affected, and to meet political leaders. He explored the health implications of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the south Asian earthquake and the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.

In 2004 Time magazine named Lee one of the world's 100 most influential people.

He enjoyed skiing, mountain biking and walking.

Lee Jong-Wook died in Geneva after undergoing emergency surgery for a blood clot in his brain.